BREKELENKAM, Quiringh van

The painting is signed with monogram on the tablecloth: Q B .

From the late 1640s Brekelenkam painted domestic subjects with middle-class figures preparing food, scrubbing pots, doing needlework, or ministering to children.

The present panel represents an interior with a woman scaling fish together with a child in a high chair near a fireplace, a bed in the background.

The painting depicts a scene in an interior with an angler and a man with line and reel.

Brekelenkam was primarily a genre painter who specialized in domestic scenes, images of trades, market and tavern scenes, still-lifes and pictures of hermits. The present painting depicts an elderly schoolmaster teaching a girl to read, while a young woman spins nearby. All three figures are intent upon their occupations, models of industry, as befits a well-ordered, seventeenth century Dutch household.

Quiringh van Brekelenkam worked in Leiden, where he was influenced by Dou’s domestic subjects and by Metsu’s broad touch and intense colours. He is best known for his paintings of men and women artisans working at various crafts: cobblers, lace makers, spinners, fish mongers, and so forth. Outstanding is his Tailor’s Shop of 1653 at the Worcester Art Museum where he finds quiet poetry in a view of a humble interior with the master and his two apprentices at work, seated tailor-fashion on the table while an old woman prepares a meal. Thirteen variations of the Worcester painting have been recorded (fine ones are at Amsterdam, London, Philadelphia, and Bonn); an indication that there must have been a good market for the motif. Like so many genre painters of his time, he turned to more elegant subjects in the sixties.

Brekelenkam worked in Leiden, where he was influenced by Dou’s domestic subjects and by Metsu’s broad touch and intense colours. He is best known for his paintings of men and women artisans working at various crafts: cobblers, lace makers, spinners, fish mongers and so forth. Like so many genre painters of his time, he turned to more elegant subjects in the sixties.

The picture depicts an old woman in an interior saying grace before a meal.

The picture depicts an old woman in an interior saying grace before a meal.

At the beginning of the 1660s, van Brekelenkam turned to representations of courtship and related themes and consequently introduced a hitherto unseen level of elegance and finesse into his work. The Sentimental Conversation of around 1663 shows elaborate furnishings as is fitting for its subject: polite conversation between a smartly dressed couple. The interactions of the figures in this picture (and related ones by the master) owe much to the art of Terborch, the foremost contemporary Dutch painter of courtship themes. The presence of a musical instrument and wine, time-honored motifs of love, suggest that the young pair converse about amorous matters. And consider as well the presence of a large, rocky landscape on the wall behind them. This landscape, with its traveler ascending a steep and arduous path, possibly comments upon the nature of the couple’s relationship and loves travail in general.

The painting depicts a scene in a tailor’s workshop with the tailor and his two apprentices and a client.

The subject of this painting is an elderly couple in the main room of a very modest home. The woman spins yarn while the man sits with his hands folded over a walking stick. In Leiden, one of the leading centres of the Dutch cloth trade, spinning was a widespread cottage industry, with both men and women doing piecework at home, supplying yarn to factory looms.

This painting, signed with initials and dated, is a typical work by Brekelenkam.